The Oxford School of Drama

Adura Onashile has been awarded a Channel 4 Playwrights’ Scheme Bursary.

Adura Onashile

Adura will be attached to the Traverse Theatre as part of her Channel 4 Playwrights’ Scheme Bursary, where she will write at least one full-length play. She will also have the opportunity to submit her play for the Sonia Friedman Productions Award in the year following her bursary.

Playwrights for the Bursary were nominated by UK theatre Artistic Directors, with the five winners selected by the scheme’s panel chaired by Sir Richard Eyre and including Film4’s Commissioning Executive Julia Oh and Channel 4’s Head of Development for Drama, Matthew Wilson.

Adura has also been announced as the National Theatre of Scotland’s Artist in Residence. Find out more at the NTS website.

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Seamus Allen

Seamus trained in his hometown, Dublin at the Conservatory of Music and Drama. After graduating he toured nationally with some of Ireland’s premier children’s theatre companies, as well as developing and performing clown performances for Barrabbas, and magic shows for Cahoots N.I. 

Since moving to the UK Seamus has appeared in The Tempest, As You Like It, Comedy of Errors, Macbeth and Robin Hood (Creation Theatre Company), Quest (Folklore Presents) The Disappearance (The Sticking Place),and Where’s My Desi Soulmate? (Rifco Arts). Tv work includes Bear Behaving Badly (Thames Valley).  Seamus is also a skilled improviser, training with Ken Campbell’s School of Night and core cast in the annual London 50 hour Improvathons and performs with “Austentatious, The improvised Jane Austen Novel”.  

Seamus was the director of the Young Company at the Watermill theatre in Newbury. He established Readings only Improvisation comedy club, “What’s the Game?! Improv”, hosting shows as well as coaching professional performers.  Seamus was Head of acting at Read college, a course which he wrote and which became one of the most successful Foundation courses for getting students into the top acting degree programmes in the UK.  Most recently he has been Head of Year at Drama Studio London and gained an MSc in Performance Psychology focusing on excellence in actor training.

Seamus is Head of Foundation and teaches on the Foundation Courses